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Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat
RocketAcademy writes "ABC News is reporting that Phantom of the Opera singer/actress Sarah Brightman outbid NASA for a seat on a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station. Brightman reportedly paid more than $51 million. If that story is true, there may be some interesting bidding wars in the future."
Now she can re-shoot "I Lost my Heart to a Starship Trooper" .... in space!
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/singers/sarah-brightman-net-worth/
It would seem she can't afford to go to space.
According to Wikipedia: "She is often credited as the creator of this genre and remains among the most prominent performers, with worldwide sales of more than 30 million records and 2 million DVDs, establishing herself as the world's best-selling soprano of all time"
Remember to feel sorry for those poor starving artists when the RIAA hits you with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for downloading a CD.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
times rich list she has around $52 million , her ex husband $1.2 billion. Maybe he is paying the bill.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
.... Capitalism Defeats America?
No doubt she make good money selling records, but its also no doubt she's making pennies on the dollar for those record sales. 30 million records does not come close to 30 million dollars. Which is why so many Aging Rockers are still playing Indian Casinos these days.
More worrying is that NASA, a MORE THAN EQUAL partner in the ISS, having built 7 of the 10 modules of the station, is being shut out of seats by Russia simply as a money grab.
Total estimated costs:
U.S.: $100 billion plus 38 billion to build the Shuttle.
Europe: $14 billion
Japan: $10 billion
Russia: Unknown, but estimated at 45 billion, mostly launch vehicles.
Canada: $2 billion
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Also, you may be the last generation of nerd who hasn't heard of her:
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
ex-husband...so that means the round trip price is $102 million
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
No doubt she make good money selling records, but its also no doubt she's making pennies on the dollar for those record sales. 30 million records does not come close to 30 million dollars. Which is why so many Aging Rockers are still playing Indian Casinos these days.
More worrying is that NASA, a MORE THAN EQUAL partner in the ISS, having built 7 of the 10 modules of the station, is being shut out of seats by Russia simply as a money grab.
Total estimated costs:
U.S.: $100 billion plus 38 billion to build the Shuttle.
Europe: $14 billion
Japan: $10 billion
Russia: Unknown, but estimated at 45 billion, mostly launch vehicles.
Canada: $2 billion
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
It's like building a beautiful vacation property on a remote island, then you find out that your 30 year old yacht is too unreliable and expensive to get there. You've been paying a Russian freighter for rides to your island, but when someone else pays them more for your seat, you realize that maybe you should have purchased a more modern yacht before you retired your old one.
That might make sense if the Russian Freighter weren't booking these passengers into YOUR Vacation Home, and paying nothing for the privilege.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Clearly, there is a market for very wealthy socialites and starlets to go be pretty in outer space with some masterbating russian cosmonauts.
Nasa is currently facing severe budget cuts.
What nasa should do, instead of deploring this incident, is broker a deal with the russian space agency to split the profits from selling the occasiona NASA seat in the soyouz capsule to rich fucks.
Considering the teeny budgets (comparatively) of both agencies, doing this could more than pay for quite a few fantastic developments in space technology and research.
And, maybe some starlets will get to laugh at the lowly members of the mile-high-club, after losing their hearts to a starship trooper.
Oh, snapski!
John
TLDR; 0.1% of the cost of this joyride could completely change the lives of a family in fairly short order.
That is not how money works.
Start by reviewing the studies of what happens to lottery winners.
Finish by worrying more about the contents of your own bank account and less about other peoples'.
Maybe her husband is banking on it being an effective one way trip and saving money in the long run?
If the artist is starving it's probably the RIAA's fault.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I bet that $50M will enhance the lives of more Russian families than it would if it were split among American families.
In practical terms, though, I bet $50M given to the Russian space agency will go to about 3-4 families who combined already probably have half the net worth or Russia.
NASA does not own space. They don't even own the International Space Station (note the name). They certainly don't own Soyuz.
except, NASA did primarily pay for the ISS. it wouldn't exist if they hadn't funded it.
sure they don't own it, but something is very wrong if scientifically significant personel are bumped for a singer who will contribute *nothing* to the further the science for which the ISS was built in the first place.
To the moon, Sarah!
What's this obsession with charity? The $50 million can also pay for hundreds of jobs in the Russian aerospace industry. Those people can then use their salaries to buy houses. Granted, she's quite literally going to be burning a lot of the money, but it's not like it will all just disappear from the economy. Even the rocket fuel is employing oil industry workers.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's very simple... NASA offers $51 million. Another party offers several million more. U.S. wants Russia to embrace capitalism; so, they do. How can we argue with that? We'll just have to hitch a ride on the next bus. Remember when you were a kid and had to borrow your parents car? You don't like the rules, buy your own.
How?
The wonders of capitalism, that's how.
Shouldn't every American commenting in this thread be celebrating that communism is dead, and the invisible hand of the market is guiding the Russians?
Or does that only apply when it benefits the US?
I think that the whole notion of "paying for the privilege" is precisely the kind of attitude that you don't want here - it moves the entire discussion into who owes whom what, exactly, and I very much doubt that the agreement as it stands would be in US favor. More likely Russia can send whomever it wants as part of its missions - i.e. it could send one extra cosmonaut, but in this case chose to send a tourist instead.
The situation is idiotic regardless of money issues, though. The purpose of ISS was not to be a lucrative destination for tourists - it was to do useful research. That Roskosmos wants to charge for the ride, even with some extra to recoup its other losses, is reasonable, but they should just stick to one flat fee, and provide NASA (and other organizations with legitimate scientific missions) a priority. To make an auction out of it is reprehensible.
At first I thought it was the Singer Sewing Machine Company who bought a seat.
Yeah, rocket fuel. It's like a form of kerosene. It doesn't have the punch of hydrogen, but it is much more stable. The Merlin engine used on the Falcon 9 uses the same fuel.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
that's ridiculous. if the US is contributing almost 2x the cash of all the others together it should buy them something. if they're going to be denied seats over a few million, screw the ISS ... we might as well build our own space station.
and also screw sarah brightman.
If it's true that NASA is missing out on a seat that they need over a few million dollars, they should just pay the few million dollars. A space shuttle launch cost $450M ($1.5B if you count the cost of the shuttles themselves). Assuming a 7 person crew, that's $64M/person. But since a typical ISS crew rotation flight only carried 3 ISS crew members, it's closer to $150M per person to get someone to the ISS (granted, there were other mission specialists and equipment/experiments on the flight). So if you look at the per-person cost of sending astronauts on the space shuttle versus Soyuz, NASA is saving money even at $50M/person.
we might as well build our own space station
If it's true that it cost $175B to build the ISS in the first place where do you think NASA is going to come up with another $175B to build their own? That's almost 10 years of 100% of NASA's current budget. And NASA still has no proven heavy lift capability to launch components into space.
Is spending the next decades NASA budget on a low earth orbit space station really a good use of their money? I'd rather see more exploration farther from the planet.
Thats cool. Now lets talk about Nasa's new 90% tax on commercial docking commercial flights to ISS...
The first stage of the Saturn V was fuelled by RP-1 (kerosene). Only the second and third stages were hydrogen
The situation is idiotic regardless of money issues, though. The purpose of ISS was not to be a lucrative destination for tourists - it was to do useful research. That Roskosmos wants to charge for the ride, even with some extra to recoup its other losses, is reasonable, but they should just stick to one flat fee, and provide NASA (and other organizations with legitimate scientific missions) a priority. To make an auction out of it is reprehensible.
Agreed... they should simply ban tourists on the ISS, by requiring anyone visiting it have a scientific reason, certain training, and proper credentials, until such time as there is no contention between scientists and would-be tourists for seats on craft bound for it.
If they don't... are they still considered to be working to earn their living?
I still wish I could be paid residuals for doing a job once... for the rest of my life...
- Toast
No its ridiculous (and yet another example of the idiotic entitlement mentality destroying this once great nation) to think that somehow the US deserves seats on the Soyuz because we helped build the ISS. We (the US) had a ride to space. It was our own pimped out space taxi. We no longer have that ride... by choice, by design, by policy, yada yada. It's not Russia's job to drive us to work just because we decided to scrap our old ride BEFORE building a new one. You want to do something (possibly) productive? Write to your representatives in .gov and tell them NASA needs more $.
I ate my sig.
And as a non-Webber fan I couldn't be happier for his loss. Phantom is the worst insult to music since someone farted Happy Birthday.
Phantom was the most successful show in history based on its own artistic merits... e.g., not as a result of some marketing trick, captive audience, vendor lock-in, or government-granted monopoly. Perhaps it is your definition of music (or the standards by which you judge it) that needs to be reassessed. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is wrong.
(Though if you're feeling snobbish, you might want to dig up Harold Bloom's opinion piece on the Harry Potter novels, entitled "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.".)
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
This article implies that http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ is inaccurate with their wealth estimates! How could that possibly be? If they were inaccurate, how could they possibly have that domain name and be quoted in highly moderated slashdot comments?
Never heard of her, and I don't care enough to google her. But I find it fucked up that singers, people who run after a ball and people who shuffle money between Excel cells are paid more than people who try to design fusion reactors or malaria vaccines. That is all.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Yeah, but the point of the flight, is those on it will have access to the ISS.
As far as I know, previous space tourists had no access to American part of ISS, only russian one. NASA controls only part of station.
This is supply and demand in action. The Russians have been granted a (possibly temporary) monopoly on the supply of transport services to the International Space Station. They have in turn, decided to sell seats to the highest bidder. The Russians have been selling access to the ISS for some time now, and it is not their problem that NASA has decided to discard their manned spaceflight capabilities with no alternate method of getting there.
I do not believe that the United States has any kind of say over who the Russians elect to send (though I am happy to be corrected on this if there is official rules to that effect), nor do i believe that they are required to give preferential treatment to NASA coming in at a lower price than what the market will bear, since if they did, they would have prevented other private passengers from doing this previously. They have voice their displeasure over private passengers, but have been unable to do anything about it.
Also if NASA is thoroughly displeased about this situation then in the true nature of capitalism they can vote with their wallets, and attempt to procure their transport services elsewhere and cease to purchase any transport services from the Russians. What? There's no one else that can do this? Tough noogies.
As to profit/subsidies etc, the Russians have been using the venerable Soyuz rocket for decades now and have always ran their space program on a shoestring budget. They are quite efficient at producing them and I would believe that they make a reasonable profit selling those seats off (people previously have paid $40 million for a ride) and wouldn't think that their is a subsidy provided by NASA, as going against their wishes and potentially losing that subsidy would not be a profitable move. Since neither of us have factual support to our respective arguments, we'll probably have to let that go.
In short, if NASA wanted to procure that spot, they should have bid higher.
we might as well build our own space station.
With blackjack! And hookers!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Actually CCDev could be done sooner if the safety requirements were relaxed somewhat. The SpaceX Dragon capsule is mostly finished and only lacks life support. Assuming there aren't any teething issues, and since the first flight was successful, the US could send someone to the ISS using it in months. This is not done because the safety requirements mandate the use of a launch escape system, something Shuttle did not have, in the new vehicles. That needs to be build and tested.
Well had NASA wanted to build a more reasonable smaller station using more automation it could be done with a couple of Delta IV Heavy launches. The Russians launched their segments with Proton and that rocket has slightly less payload capacity than the Delta.
The reason why it should be a fixed price because it's not a fucking commercial enterprise, it's not supposed to be about profit and supply and demand to begin with. If it were, we'd have corporations doing it, not government. But it wasn't corporations that built ISS in the first place, so...
And if you think that this extra money will really be used to "build better systems", you're very naive - and I'm saying this as a Russian.
I don't suppose we can take this as an example of why we shouldn't ever pay someone whose job is singing or acting or something else that doesn't matter enough money to fuck something like this up?
You realize this dumb bitch bidding up the price of a seat like this is going to force NASA to outbid her, costing the taxpayers (who provide NASA with the money they're going to need to spend to outbid her,) millions of dollars just so she can go play astronaut for a few days. There's a simple solution of course, and that is arrest her, charge her with... whatever, I'm sure she's done drugs at some point... and freeze or confiscate her assets, and then we (the People of the United States,) won't have to try to outbid her.
OR, just fine her the difference between what NASA ends up paying and what they would have paid. Solved.
It's called capitalism. Russia is a hotbed of capitalism.
If you don't like it in the communist states of america, start your own space program.
Again, a bad summary... Sarah Brightman didn't "outbid" NASA, as they weren't in competition for the same seat. Nor did she "bump" a NASA astronaut from a bought-and-paid-for seat. She paid for a spare seat more than NASA does for it's scheduled seat, in the same way that someone who buys a ticket at the last minute pays more than someone who bought a ticket three months in advance.
So no, this is no indication that there are bidding wars on the horizon. Just more bad journalism and more bad summaries.
...So you want NASA a non-policing body, to arrest a Foreign national, for being involved in a transaction in a second foreign country, which is perfectly legal in all three countries ....
Do the words "outside your jurisdiction" and "not illegal" mean anything to you?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Lots of things are a waste of time and resources - or worse. I drive automobiles, despite the horrific toll they take on the environment and our lives. And this is mostly just to improve my standard of living. I keep my house heated to about 70 degrees, when I don't need anywhere near that amount of heat to survive. I eat meat, which costs something like 7 times the amount of grain that is necessary for me to live comfortably. I run the A/C sometimes in the summer, for no reason other than comfort. Occasionally I take a boat ride, for no reason other than pleasure. I just re-did a perfectly livable room in my house because it looked "dated", and I'm going to pull out a perfectly serviceable bathroom for the same reason. I wash my clothes just so they smell nice. I have clothes that I only wear on special occasions. I buy toys that I don't really need. I use disposable batteries. I post on Slashdot. My engineering job is in the microelectronics industry, which is almost entirely composed of sales of consumer toys. You are playing with one of them right now. I waste resources all the time - who the hell am I to judge Sarah Brightman?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.